The Chase
by TheCicada
Summary: Len follows a systematic lifestyle of repression and order. Rin embraces day-to-day violence and chaos. Their lives are seemingly opposed. However, one thing haunts these vastly separate soldiers. Hidden in the hills that harbour a strange nostalgia for the both of them, distant voices connect the pair, threatening to draw them together. Inspired by the Karakuri Burst series.


Everyone's done the Karakuri Burst fanfic. It's old, it's not really relevant anymore, and I am doing it again.

A sappy reinterpretation of the series, especially inspired by_ Unmei-Gokko_, with a focus on character relationships rather than the plot as a whole (mainly because for the life of me I couldn't tell you what exactly it is), written with a wheelbarrow-full of liberty.

Warnings for some violence, a swear word or two and brief sex, albeit not-very-graphic. I apologise in advance for any inaccuracies, both in terms of the plot and other details. I tried to do my research... (A rather large thank you to Suzunosuke for designing the characters with such asshole-to-write-about but symbolically apt weapons. When was a fight scene ever realistic, anyway?)

* * *

**The Chase**

A wayward gust of wind caught him off guard.

It lifted his hat genially and tossed it behind him, tousling his hair and launching itself back into the sky as quickly as it had come. The man stood dumbfounded for a moment, his thoughts wrenched from him with his hat. Slowly he sighed, a languid hand coming to his head to pat it, as though he was new to the idea of reality and needed to verify that his head was indeed bare now. The faux-leather of his glove caught on strands of hair as he stooped and lifted the stiff thing from its place in the grass. He secured it over his hair, which had taken to whipping about in the light breeze, and tried to recapture the sound he had been imagining.

He tried to manufacture in his mind that particular voice, the way it said his name, the person to whom it belonged; but it was lost for the moment, and the scarce feelings of joy attached to it had disappeared along with it. The man began his descent back to town. He was tired of chasing it for today.

* * *

"Drowning your sorrows in a glass of water?" Meiko had asked the night before, sitting herself on the stool beside him. Len gave an unpractised smile. His fingers caressed the rim of the glass like those of an addict, betraying his nervousness, but the metallic glint in his eye remained.

"I'm a unit of the state," Len insisted, lifting the glass to his lips at last. Without drinking, he finished, "I don't function on any spectrum that includes sorrow in it." He tipped the glass back and pressed his lips together firmly as it came down. Meiko's laugh unsettled him, igniting the suspicion that his indifference wasn't as clear in his body language as it was in his words.

"I see. What's it called again when a person's actions are so extreme that it's impossible to tell whether they're joking or not?" She linked her fingers together and stretched her arms before her. They came dangerously close to knocking over the lanky glass of port she had brought with her before she rested her hands beneath her chin, huffing. "That's you. All the time. You're so serious it's funny." She looked him over, trying to catch his gaze. "But that girl seems to have you in a dull mood."

Len eyed his drinking companion with controlled neutrality. Meiko noted how composed he had been when she spoke to him in the station a month prior. He was his usual self. She didn't miss the way his eyes seemed to quiver now, slight as the movement was. "Did he send you over, then?"

Meiko didn't have to look back. Last she saw, the commander was engaged in subdued conversation with another subordinate, sipping occasionally from a glass of port identical to hers and watching their exchange on the other side of the room. "We all know I get to the point quickest," she shrugged.

Len stared into his glass as though it were as deep as an ocean. "Why now?"

"I don't know - maybe he was hopeful enough to assume you'd be drunk. This is a party, after all." She gestured limply to the scene around them, their colleagues mingling amongst a makeshift arrangement in the dimly-lit local hall. The air was dank due to recent rain, and every time the doors opened the smell of smoke floated inside. The small hall was crammed with the smell of tobacco and wood smoke and rain. It could have been called intimate, but there were enough people loitering and sprawling that the proximity lent it a sort of reluctance. Two people could hold a conversation and be in earshot of countless people, but they were more careful not to listen. The force's more recent failures stifled much of the celebration, people sitting and drinking and tapping languid feet, but it was their anniversary and thus a more or less obligatory event.

"I just came to help with the preparations," Len said vaguely.

A moment of silence passed. Meiko mistook Len's understated finality for hesitation, but when she waited for several more seconds and was rewarded with no hint of change in his disturbed composure, she spoke again. "You'll have to come clean sooner or later. He decided the sooner, the better." She watched him stare and felt a twang of discomfort at his secrecy. She tapped her fingers and sighed. After a pause, she said, "You know, I really liked him when we were younger."

Len blinked in surprise at her sudden detour in the one-way conversation. "Who?"

Meiko smirked and tipped her head in the Commander's direction. "We had a thing. As teens. It's pure luck that we both ended up here, and in the same division on top of that. I hadn't seen him in years." She glanced sideways at her companion and smiled when she saw that he had become attentive. His face was as blank as a sheet of paper, but at least it was turned to her and not to oblivion, and didn't seem about to turn away. "I know first-hand what it's like to be reunited with someone and then have to treat them like an instrument of war. But I do it anyway." She tilted her head, assessing his reaction and raising an eyebrow when he looked away, slipping back into his pensive stare. "Moral of the story, Len; people's lives are more important than being kind."

"You're more blunt than I thought."

"You're every bit as blunt as you're infamous for," she retorted. Then, she placed her chin back on her hands. "There's no way to put it nicely. It's a shitty situation. It really is."

"I don't know her." He shrugged. "I'm being honest."

Meiko watched him. Her eyes were not hard, but they searched his profile unabashedly. "Are you sure?"

The silence from earlier made its return and settled between them, buffered by the cacophony of chatter and mediocre music. "I don't know," Len answered finally, his reserve uncertain now that he had finished searching the space before him and returned to staring into his glass with no answers. "I honestly couldn't tell you who she is. I don't know her name." Meiko listened to him, so he continued. His voice was quiet. "Something just happened. We recognised each other, but I'm certain I've never seen her before."

The woman beside him sipped her wine and looked pointedly into the glass, trying to understand what he sought. "You realise she was powerful - possibly one of the most powerful of the Karakuri's current units?" Len was becoming quickly impatient. His knee bounced under the counter and his eyes were steel. "I know you've had your fair share of reprimand because of it, but Len... you're a very capable member of our squadron. To be frank, I've never seen you screw up like that."

"I don't know why!" he said with sudden indignation, something terrified crossing his face before he looked away, mussing the back of his hair with one hand and gripping his glass with the other.

There was a moment of salvant silence. "I need as much information on her as I can get," Meiko pointed out. She shrugged again. "But look, if it's consolation at all, I have no info against you." She briefly laid a hand on his shoulder and stood up. "As far as she goes, right now we only know what you know."

Meiko was about to turn away when Len replied. "That's little consolation, I'm afraid."

* * *

Len inhaled the spring air. The pungent scent of sweet grasses and unhindered mountain wind filled his lungs and emptied his head of all thought. He closed his eyes – then opened them again, quickly shaking the sensation away. He hadn't meant to take part in such unconscious pleasure, or breathe so deeply. He shrugged his jacket further around him and crossed his arms, looking about him with the objective observance he had been trained to always use, and seeing a pair of little birds collecting materials for their nest. He watched them for a moment before trudging onwards through the bowing grass stalks, back to the town he called his residence.

The unadulterated delight the world seemed to take in itself astounded him. It isolated him in the way a group of children might isolate a grown-up. He knew better than to enjoy the hush and thrum of trees whispering. One could sit all day and night trying to decipher their words and come up with little more than simple, residual emotion. There was no point.

He could watch these hills forever, lie in the grass with his eye patch discarded beside him, waiting and trying to remember, and he would never know what it was he was hoping to find, exactly. It was like sitting in a room and seeing your own silhouette on the ground before you, every corner of the room touched by a light that had no source. It was feeling the breeze on your neck and being aware of some distant voice that floated on it. It was the sense that this closed, square room had only three walls, and a plain opened out behind you where you thought there was only dry white paint. But every time Len turned to see, his vision became clouded by the brightness.

A blinded eye would never see again.

* * *

"Are you ready?"

The slight girl gripped her gun in both hands. Everything about her was thin - thin limbs, thin hair, thin lips and thin, scared eyes. She couldn't have been any older than fifteen, but they'd never found out for certain.

The girl nodded. Her eyes were rimmed by an unsightly dark colour and her hands were unsteady, her shoulders slumped. She had been awoken at four in the morning that day by the sound of a gunshot, and yesterday's weakest trainee was missing at breakfast. No wonder she was reluctant, the instructor thought. She lifted her gun and cocked it in one swift movement. After a few lessons, the girl had learnt that this was a warning.

She leapt clumsily aside and yelped as a bullet disappeared over her left shoulder, the noise like a slap. Another impossibly loud 'bang' heralded the bullet that caused a tiny breeze over her right shoulder, the sour odour of burnt hair suddenly present about her. She needed to move.

Three more 'bangs' cracked the air as the girl dropped and rolled, always moving closer to her young instructor. As she hit the ground, she could feel blood pulsing like rounds of electric shocks through her body, rattling the cavity of her chest and sending an unnameable energy through her moving limbs. She had learnt to control it despite the taste of bile and the feeling of being unable to breathe through the tightness in her throat. She no longer noticed the way her body moved as if on its own to land painlessly on one shoulder. Her aim was only to move closer. She had been supplied with one bullet.

The instructor shot again. Missed. Deftly she moved to reload her gun, for a moment oblivious to her student mouthing - "six".

She pounced on the opportunity to run forward, dodging pre-emptively as the instructor raised her gun again and shot. The girl's hands shook and a weak cry escaped her as she broke finally upon her opponent. Her ears rang with the final shot before she tackled her mentor to the ground, a rugged scream bursting from her throat, and turned the barrel onto her. She pressed the cold metal against her instructor's forehead. Her goal was trapped beneath her. She would survive today.

Aware of the weight of every lost millisecond, the girl braced through the fevered pains in her arms, taut as her fingers clutched the gun like vices.

She pulled the trigger.

A 'click' emptied the scene of all sound.

She pulled the trigger again. 'Click.' To their left, a family of birds began to sing.

Suddenly, the instructor laughed. Her bright, teal-coloured hair spread like a puddle of blood around her head, feigning something tragic. Her smile seemed perfectly appropriate to a teenage girl lying in a field on a sunny day. She cradled her gun as though it were a lover's hand, her protégé's device still pressed futilely to her head. The instructor let go of her gun to stroke the girl's cheek. She was crying, her eyes wide with shock and her mouth parted dumbly. Tears seeped between the instructor's fingers.

"I just wanted to know you could do it," she said and drew the girl close to her, prying the empty gun from her trembling fingers. Her timid nature had finally been thawed out, revealing beneath it a fierce asset and securing her safety for the time being.

The hills spoke as subtly as ever. Trees shifted with murmurs, the wind swept through the grass and birds twittered from unseen nests. But now it all seemed to ring with gunshot.

Of course her instructor would choose this place. There was no better way of destroying someone's innocence than to corrode the voice of the hills with the sound of exploding gunpowder and memories of flesh warped by metal. The girl thought she had kept the voice a secret.

* * *

The hills leading to his town were sun-stained. Every colour was biased towards a warm yellow, from the pale grass to the umber trees. He was clothed all in black, provoking the sun to send its heat for company. How he must have looked like an awkward blemish.

Suddenly acutely aware of himself, that he had somehow disrupted the scene around him, he felt a self-conscious twang. It was feeling which had developed over his time in the state services, and one he knew well. He needed to find out where the undeniable sensation of being watched was coming from. Instead of taking the last step that would conceal him beneath a steep slope, invisible from the hillside where he had been standing only moments ago but plunging him into the unknown, he turned around. There where his hat had flown off earlier, standing perfectly still in the grass, a swathe of red punctured the gentle palette around it.

She watched him with a narrow eye, coloured unforgiving rouge. Even the golden tone of it framing her face was made volatile by a camellia bleeding over the bun she wore. A messily wound bandage concealed her other eye and the majority of a scar falling over the bridge of her nose.

The two looked at each other motionlessly, neither face betraying anything but composure. But Len's breath quickened. He felt a rush of adrenalin at the impending encounter. His muscles tensed slightly, prepared to unleash the sequence of attacks they knew perfectly. But he found beneath his body's automatic responses a surprising sense of relief. He didn't know such feelings could coexist without burning each other out or exploding into violence. The woman's gun was holstered. She made no move to draw it yet.

Taking tentative steps, concealed as caution, he advanced back up the slope. Her eyes fell on the sword sheathed at his hip as he came closer to her, and he realised he was only improving his range should they draw weapons on each other. Her mouth drew up at the edges humourlessly as he came to a stop, several sword-lengths away from her. The ground beneath them was level now.

Neither spoke. Both held their hands where they could easily grab their preferred devices for killing.

* * *

Len's physical and technical training was complete by the time he was a young adult. Despite his youth, his attitude to code and procedure was obsessive. When agents checked in, they'd be exasperated to see that Len had signed on within a minute of the same time every day, even when there was nothing to be done and most people came and went casually. He was pedantic about routine to the point that his actions were predictable – dangerously so, as his colleagues would say – but nobody could have snuck up on him while he polished his weaponry in the morning or filled out forms during lunch break if they had wanted to. He knew where other people would be and what they wanted.

When the new commander spoke with him, he had at first felt the young man's hard gaze and vaguely searching questions as aversion to his authority, but his consistency in analysing everything and everyone, as an automatic function of his day-to-day life, soon dissolved this presumption. He never smiled. In a way, it made his cold disposition all the more impersonal. He would have said forgivable, but there was nothing to forgive.

Len searched people for clues to some unanswered question. Nobody knew what it was he sought to find in the blades of perfectly polished swords or in identical numbers on sign-in sheets.

When he was seen venturing into the hills in the private few hours he had, the riddle was only resolved in a collective acceptance that nobody knew what he was doing.

Len held his _katana_ above his lap, looking into the sharpened silver mirror, long, ambiguous and unrevealing. He saw the dim grey light dripping into the storage room through windows perched far above eye-level, grates sectioning the clouds in containment cells. Slowly extending the sword before him, alone in this compartment of the station, he contemplated his suitability to the weapon. It was an extension of his body, of his swift perception, in a way that a messy, imprecise gun could never be. It had been utilised for centuries, but depended on its wielder to make it work.

He knew where it needed to strike.

Segregating the hills and the quiet, sweetly lulling voice into a place where they were silenced, he stood and fought the Karakuri before him, killing them after a short struggle as his blade cut through the dust that swirled in the window's narrow stream of light. It was always too easy. So agonisingly simple, the process of reading another person and incapacitating them. A controlled breath of air depleted the silence for a second, and then it rushed back in like wind, provoked by his sudden stillness. He felt it press in, suffocating him.

Destroy. The only way to repel this uncertainty was to destroy it at its source. Over and over, if he had to. The mechanism of each chaotic Karakuri needed to be dismantled if he was to find the one within which lay whatever it was he sought.

With each cut, he became deeper enshrouded, unable to turn the reflection of the sword on himself. What was he missing? He had strength. He had order. What part of him ached beyond his control, a phantom limb attached to a sound body? When would the deliberately arranged shards of his life come together?

Once again, left with no other choice but to drown in something as unrestrained as frustration, he raised his sword and fought, alone in the storage room.

* * *

She didn't know what time it was. She'd been awake for long enough to forget.

The last time she had slept – yesterday night, she thought – she had had to drag herself through nightmares and periods of darkness devoid of real rest until she couldn't fall asleep again, sometime before sunrise. She had for a moment lamented that those strange, yellow-dyed dreams of the week before had not returned, and was eager to inflict retribution by the middle of the day. She locked those spare few images away in a dark room of her mind and made sure they were out of reach of herself or anybody else.

The voice she had heard on the verge of sleep or at the cusp of waking haunted her. It called her name clear as the moonlight that prevented her from shutting her eyes. So with determination to overcome her ailments, like a sick person defiantly shrugging off the pain in their body, she strolled into the town, stroking the hilt of the gun hidden on her leg.

* * *

Len's squadron had already assembled by the time the first gunshots were heard. An elderly merchant on the outskirts of town had been awake and saw a Karakuri, unmistakeable, he said, and informed a neighbour, who came running a back route into the town centre to inform them. His description of her was not one that troubled Len any more than it reasonably should have, at first, and he took in his stride the dutiful feeling that he was ready. His squadron would eliminate the Karakuri, and he would be on the frontline. This was a day he had been anticipating. It was three in the morning, he noted quickly. Three AM was the time he would finally inflict his retribution.

* * *

"Tell me!" She howled, opening fire on the window of a house. Inside, a high-pitched voice screamed. She glared at the white disc of the moon above her and took aim. "Come find me!" She shot and imagined the first crater she saw in the wake of the gun barrel's blast as being her own creation. A man who had run from his house, axe in hand with the intention of protecting his family, lay still on the ground a way before her. She passed him unflinchingly, reloading her gun as she moved.

* * *

"When you see hold my hand above my head like this," the commander said to Len, "it means you don't need bother capturing her."

Len understood the implication of his words.

"Kaito!" It was Meiko, second-in-command. "She's made it to the bastion. Our team's been incapacitated." The commander calmly heeded her news and turned to Len.

"Go there now. We'll back you up as soon as possible." Moving towards the door where his sword sat in wait on a desk, he said, "I'll be in eyeshot."

Len nodded and turned to the lamplight of the sleepless town.

* * *

"Rin," she heard from somewhere in the dark, and laughed ferociously. How many people did she have to kill before it went away? She raised her gun with the intention of shooting whatever she might see in front of her, but held back the urge when she saw a single figure advancing confidently towards her from an alleyway.

"A real fight?" she demanded. It was worth leaving them alive until she could see them. But as he became illuminated, she realised it was a man in uniform, like the few people she had just managed to dispose of, and her spirits sank a little. She needed some real distraction.

Impatiently, she shot the man - and realised too late that he had run aside, and was speeding back towards her from another angle. She swung round and fired with an exultant shout, but missed her target.

Suddenly she found herself having to jump back to avoid the glint of a sword, losing her advantage when she couldn't bring her gun back up or risk losing her arms. At the end of a swift combination of slashes from the man in front of her, he brought back his sword to change techniques. She took the opportunity to turn and run, spinning to fire again before trying to put enough distance between them that he would fall out of range. Her last bullet had torn a shred of his jacket loose, but the man was unharmed.

She came to a reluctant standstill and laughed, her gun lowered. The man made no move.

"Are you here to capture me?" She asked. "Or are you coming to kill me?"

He held his sword to the side, baring his indifference. "We'll only capture you, if you'd allow us to," he said. "If you don't, both options are available to us."

Her grin was the usual brand of unsettling; psychopathic but just lucid enough to make a normal person nervous. It was ugly and lopsided on her young face. Air blew between her teeth - she was laughing.

"Fuck you."

The revolver's barrel gaped before him and fired.

The fight that followed lived in his memory as a blur. He was aware of the pain in his inner thigh, torn by a bullet, but it could not beg him loudly enough to stop. Rather, the burn spurred him. His conscious mind was focused in the way that left him thoughtless and without feeling. He was a passenger in a body that repeated movements it had been taught for years. Aiming for the throat. Reading. Avoiding. Attacking. His opponent moved swiftly, a pattern on the scenery of the dark town and the dusty lamplight. Even to him, her movements seemed random. He counted her actions tirelessly, but the fight did not end where it might normally, with the Karakuri at his feet after a few brief clashes. No – this was difficult. It complemented his purpose.

He only remembered the point when, in the satisfaction of laying a shallow but blaringly red blow to her arms, he decided that whatever had occupied his sorrows lately, whatever he had been looking for – for a second, he had found. He thought it must have been vengeance.

A trip. The woman's ankle rolled as she turned, and Len luged upon his opportunity. He brought down his sword and she raised her gun as a scarce shield. Their weapons became locked, metal against metal in a match of brute force. He looked straight into her one uncovered eye, saw her manic, painful smile and felt her breath on his cheek. The moment seemed to freeze – then, suddenly, he felt a jolt. Like standing up too quickly in the heat of summer, he weakened and his vision became blurred by marks and dashes. The clean, white shell of reality cracked, and something else emerged from within.

He was in the hills, overwhelmed by the sudden sensation of someone's arms around him. A drunken warmth extended slowly through his fingertips, peace unlike anything he had felt in wakefulness or sleep settling over him. A voice was talking to him over the drone of cicadas. He was laughing, his voice high and breathy.

A shock rattled his sword.

He felt the tremors of pain after losing his eye, hot blood streaming down his cheek as he watched a child being carried away, screaming for him to follow. The haze returned to infect his eyes, clouding out her face. The metallic scent of blood from their wounds seemed to intensify. The voice was screaming from within the black.

Her voice.

The haze cleared again to reveal the Karakuri, and the wideness of her eyes told him that she, too, had seen.

The curve of her cheeks was suddenly familiar. Her anxious eye was one he knew from hours of having looked into, despite that it was no longer blue. He stared at her, her name so close beneath the surface of his memory that it seemed to throb there. She pulled her gun away and stepped fearfully back, breathing gasps of air and letting the device fall to her side. His sword clattered to the ground, having nothing to lean on anymore.

Despite shouts from his colleagues and gunshots on the woman's heels, he only watched her run as quickly as he imagined she could, disappearing from the town in a matter of minutes. He looked up and saw his commander standing atop a building in the darkness, his hand raised high.

* * *

The air about them seemed to have slowed. They stood alert, knowing that any lapse of concentration or yielding to the magnetic quality of the other would be dangerous. Len drove the feeling of familiarity away. He tried not to let the strange images from his dreams and from their first encounter cloud his focus.

"Why are you making no move to kill me?" he jeered.

She remained still. "I'm not taking a walk with the aim of killing someone at some point."

"You're a murderer," he pointed out.

"And you're not?" She grinned at the sight of his grimace. "What are you wearing that for, then?" She gestured to his uniform.

He touched the hem of his jacket – one with no signs of having been shot and bloodied – and replied, "Technically, I'm on duty."

"So you should capture me?" she asked. It was an honest question of his responsibilities, rather than an invitation.

He nodded. "I should. Why are you still wearing that?" he returned. The blood had been mostly washed from her garb, but it was the same one from the night she had stormed the town. It frayed where the seams had begun to unravel, and daylight revealed faded patches in the red fabric.

She shrugged. "Coincidence. At least I'm recognisable."

With the benefit of real light, Len could better take in her features. She was young, but lean rather than rounded or soft. Her plain prettiness was overshadowed by dark rims beneath her eyes and that unhappy mouth. A scar ran over the bridge of her nose, and Len only realised after a moment that he had one in the same place.

Ever since that encounter, he had come up to these hills every day, searching blindly as he used to do. "There's no such thing as coincidence." And yet they happened upon each other, on the same hill at the same time. It was such a blatant possibility, Len knew, but it appeared to him now as profound.

"Why did it take so long?" she said, as though she could hear him mulling his question over.

"For what?" he said.

She stepped closer to him and he grasped his sword. Smirking, she took her gun from its holster, dropping it on the ground beside her. His hand froze and he stared at the woman. "Now yours," she said.

He sheathed his sword with a 'clang' and shook his head in disbelief. But, obediently, he removed the sword and its belt and laid it on the ground, out of reach.

"Don't try to pretend nothing happened that night," she accused once it was safely on the ground. "I know you." She looked over his shoulder, avoiding his eye. "What's your name?"

"Len," he said. He watched as she tested it out, a single, silent syllable on her lips. "Well?" he demanded, his heartbeat shaking his throat.

"Rin." She looked expectantly at him. He looked back. "Say it."

"Rin..." He felt it like a tangible shape on his lips. "Rin." The name formed itself. It was a word he felt he knew somehow, like he could have called it out in his sleep a hundred times, but never remembered after waking up.

When he looked at her again, he was shocked by her expression. The barrier between them had broken.

* * *

Ever since he had become aware of her voice, he had chased it. He had walked ceaselessly until he realised it was nightfall, and had to sleep in the hills or risk hurting himself in the dark on a trek back to headquarters for punishment. Alone in his bed, he would wake at the sound of someone calling from far away – from behind some tree, from within a cluster of boulders from some age-old collapse – and he would feel so compelled to go find them that he wouldn't be able to sleep for the rest of the night. How could he abandon her? He couldn't fall back to sleep when she was crouched somewhere, trusting him to come discover her and lead her back to safety. He couldn't just leave headquarters and go traipsing through the countryside in search of phantoms, though. He had to leave her there, imagining a waiting form among the hills, repeating his name until the sky turned grey with the morning.

"Find me..."

She was often wounded by Miku or one of the others while practically learning the locations of vital organs and major arteries because her attention would be directed elsewhere. When they put her in a makeshift hospital bed, training against pain and against later against inattention as they stitched without anaesthetics, she diverted her mind to the voice that she chased. It was a desperate chase, through the hills, looking everywhere and seeing nobody, going anywhere and still able to hear him, wondering aloud where he had disappeared to.

"Rin... Rin!"

She chased the voice as one would chase a shadow. It was her own making. "Who are you!?"

Turning and seeing nothing but hills spilt with orange sunset.

"Where have you gone...?"

Where was it?

"Help me!"

"Come find me..."

* * *

It was stronger than on the first night. They were returned no memories, but the same distinct feeling of having replenished some of their loss descended upon them. Len stared at the ground, hypnotised by old emotions that suddenly infused themselves into the present. He heard Rin's breath shudder and looked up. "Really?" she said, her eyes sliding to the ground. His lips trembled around her name. She was someone he had loved.

"I found you," she said.

He stepped towards her, for an instant being overcome by certainty. Her arms encircled him and he lifted his hand to touch her cheek, realising it was still gloved and quickly removing them both. He swept her fringe back to see the bandages beneath, when she reached behind her head and untied them. Her left eye was milky white and barely visible between her scarred lids. Slowly, testing his reaction, she unclasped his eye patch and let it fall into the grass, taking his face in her hands and verifying their mutual existence. "We match," she said, a gentle thumb touching his right eyelid and the scar that crossed it. "We're ingrained in each other." When he felt his eyes well with tears, it was not happiness that prompted them. The sight of her old injuries seemed superimposed over the image of somebody he knew. He knew this face, but the scars only emphasised how long ago he had last been able to say so.

Something untainted by their time spent apart pulled their bodies together, diminishing any doubt left in them. Forsaking all logic and all order, Len drew Rin's face to his and pressed their broken lips together.

* * *

The grass folded beneath them and Len wondered if, despite their former youth, they had ever done this before. Their place in the half-shade of the nearest tree felt comfortable. The contours of their bodies met clumsily, but the movements seemed familiar. Tangible on Rin's lips before she made any sound, he could hear her voice, from another world but echoed perfectly in the present.

The month-old wound on her arm had not healed; Len could see small blood stains on the bandages, and had to look away. The way she propped herself over him, her elbows digging into the earth and her bandaged forearm taut, it must have been painful. Carefully, so as not to touch it, he lifted his hands to her. He traced the scars on each of her shoulders, unsure as to what they were caused by but eager to be their balm. He let his hands slip over the nape of her neck and down her back, coiling around her to rest on her narrow hips, allowing the simple happiness of touching another person to fill him. He leaned up to put his lips to her scars, the motion slowing her movements. Nonetheless she hugged him to her, baring her neck for him and feeling his voice quiver on her throat. It felt impossible that they were still able to share this one, basic act of unity. As the thought crossed his mind, he returned her embrace.

* * *

Len had tried to roll onto his side to hold Rin's thin frame close to him, but the wound on his leg prevented it. Instead Rin laid herself on top of him, arms finally at rest, her legs on either side of his uninjured one. Her hair was limp and bedraggled, wisps of it spilling onto his skin as her cheek rested on his shoulder.

For a while, they listened to each other breathe. The dusty green colour of the tree's canopy above their heads rippled like the surface of water hit by sunlight. The world seemed to have been inverted – back to the way it had been born, released from the backwards imitation it had been made. It came like a stumble, a shock – and then a breath caught again which had been lost. The air felt filled with oxygen, a more permanent form of the atmosphere up on this particular hill that Len had so often drunk with eyes shut, when he submerged himself in the voice he chased.

Her body was so warm. His arm was slung comfortably over her back, the other sprawled in the grass with his fingers unfurled, skyward. Rin's eye blinked with lethargy, her expression one of calm. "So," she said so gradually and softly it might have been the breeze. A grin revealed her to be the same smirking Rin from earlier, but a small smile persisted even beyond it. "You're one of them."

Len mulled over her impartial gaze. "I am. And I never expected a Karakuri."

Rin traced a light finger over his bottom eyelid. She looked at the pale crescent moon of his blind eye, the flesh imperfect around it. "I didn't expect anything at all." She let her fingertips glide down to his cheekbone, touching the unmarred skin there. "It was real, then. Something really was wrong." She stifled a sigh. Her lips pressed together. "I felt like my past was never quite... intact."

"What do you remember?" Len asked.

Rin shrugged, her bandages shifting as her arms moved. "Not much. I was in an orphanage for a while."

"So was I."

She stared at him, her face neutral. "Were we friends?"

"I don't know."

"If we were in the same place, it makes sense." She hesitated. Her gaze fixed on his face, without eye contact, as she thought. "What was it like there?"

Len made a quiet, considering noise and cast a glance above them, as though searching the swaying branches. "It looked... a lot like this place. The orphanage was the only thing close by." He closed his eye and let the warmth of her hand slip into his skin, the calloused texture fresh and earthen. It calmed his mind as he strained to recall images that had long since become weathered away – not by age, for he'd not long ago been young enough to still be called an orphan. "But there was a town. I remember it was a little way away, and sometimes we'd go there."

Rin seemed to nod slightly, her hair shifting over his collarbone. He considered again that it was a strange feeling to move his hand along the shape of another person's body and see them smile. "Whatever happened," she murmured, "whoever you are, I'm glad I've found you."

The words seeped into him as though they carried tangible warmth. They sank down, down to his chest, and then triggered his next muggy thought. Like a waking mind, it floated upwards, resting in his head in a way that was not yet urgent, but impossible to ignore for the sense that, beyond their safe bubble in time, it would be. "What about after this?"

"After?" Rin repeated. "What about it?"

"What are we going to do?" She peered up at him with a steady eye, and he saw reflected in its surface his own silhouette. We, he had said. The breeze suddenly felt a little colder.

She gave an irreverent chuckle. "We aren't alone anymore," she said. "No matter where we go, this is carved into us." She rested her head again, and slowly, he leaned back against the grass, staring through the tree branches. "We never really were, were we? But the fact remains..." The leaves cast dappled light onto her hair, and Len had to refrain from wrapping his arms around her to suppress her next words. "I have a master to go back to. She'll kill me if I don't, anyway. And I don't know you."

_But we know each other better than anyone,_ he wanted to say. _Every day, you've been in this wind with me._ Whenever he went out in secret, blind to anyone else and disguised from the rest of humanity, there was Rin.

"We know each other... inherently," he managed to say. "You're chaos. I'm order."

"Natural enemies," she commented airily.

"It doesn't matter," he said, flinching at the words that held so little gravity. "It doesn't matter."

Suddenly Rin pushed herself up, elbows either side of him in the grass. He didn't move as she covered his eye with her hand, reducing his visible spectrum to the deep red of the blood in her fingers, lit by the sun, and the darkness she held in her palm. "What do you see?"

He moved his lips to reply "nothing", but stopped. Emerging from his blindness, shapes he could recognise formed and unfurled into the answer. This was the red of twilight, a colour he knew too well. These were the stains on the ground after the little Karakuri had devastated a town and left it to dry up. This was everything her small hand had crafted and destroyed. "You?" he said.

She laughed so that he could hear the real smile in it. "Of course. We've already proven all this, Len." A moment of silence settled over the hillside. Even the sounds of the trees seemed to still. "But I need the chase. I'll destroy us, otherwise, and so will you." She hesitated. "I'll kill anything but this. It's enough to live for. To do anything for."

Something wove its way across his abdomen, his breath too painful to hold inside. Gunshots raced silently across his vision. "I know."

She moved off of him then, keeping his eye covered. Reflexively, he reached for her, and felt her other hand jab him in the arm. "So keep your eye closed," she said. "Remember me."

* * *

When Len awoke the next day, his sword back in its place and his uniform neatly folded, he stayed a moment in bed, back against the headboard. He had awoken three minutes before his alarm could do it for him – plenty of time to remember.

He had kept his eye shut, just as Rin had instructed him to do, and listened as she picked up her clothing and left without another word.

Letting a murderer get away. Letting the purpose for everything he did in his waking life be overshadowed.

He had stayed on the ground, eyes shut, until he grew cold, and the blistered light of the sun on his eyelid disappeared. The last thing he thought, with such fervent determination that he could have cut the words into himself, was a cry against the approaching night, and the day that followed.

_Today was real._

As he shut off his alarm, ringing in the din, he sighed. He washed, dressed, and reached for his eye patch, the first ritual complete. The haunting could begin anew.

He measured out a teaspoon of tea and boiled a quarter teapot of water. Like a sub-section in his routine, he acknowledged the stifled yearning that remained after his dreams.

Halfway through pouring his tea, he stopped. Drawing back the pot like an afterthought and quickly wiping up a small spill, he tried to recollect himself and found his eyes drawn to the window above the sink.

The sky was painted two colours. The enveloping grey of the night met the pink of morning, settling like a mist over the hills. Where the two met, they created a seam in the air.

Len watched day break on the landscape for a long while. When he finally picked up his mug and drank his tea, it was lukewarm.

As he rushed to gather up his sword and leave for headquarters, one sound entered his mind. It was not from a past long severed, but from yesterday. Just as unreachable, but all the closer to who he was today, it rang out like a reminder.

"It's enough to live for."


End file.
